Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 40 of 84

38 ORNAMENT 37.1.2013
"all wrapped up in newspaper work"
(1917) suggests how hostesses could throw newspaper
parties by decorating their tables with miniature
telegraph poles, offering menus listing food by its
advertising slogans, and organizing games in which
couples could be paired through custom "want ads" or
attendees could edit their own
paper. She suggests guests attend
such parties wearing "a newspaper
dunce cap and long flowing cape; a
complete robe fashioned of
newspapers, belted in at the waist; a
large brimmed hat of several
thicknesses of newspapers; long
flowing skirts, plaited ones, sailor
collars, and puffed sleeves, all of
newspaper." 7 For some parties
attendees created their newspaper
attire as part of the festivities, often
with humorous restraints such as
the men being required to make the
costumes on their dates, without the
women giving "so much as a hint to
their awkward dressmakers."8
Newspaper costumes and parties
generally were associated with
youth. Even children participated in
the recurring fad, and the Sun and
New York Herald described a
costume, worn to a fancy masquerade ball in 1920 by
young Miss Sarita Mejia, as having a "pleated underskirt
of the general news, pleated overskirt, cut pointed, with
front piece of the comic page and side of the magazine
section."9 The Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle
reported on a girls' newspaper fashion parade in 1922 in
which the winner, a seven-year-old named Albersina
Schieber, wore a "work of extreme art" that was
"carefully cuffled, scalloped and sewed from the colored
pages of a comic sheet."10
Often newspaper costumes served as promotional
tools, including a dress, ca. 1893, in the collection of the
Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
made of cotton with newspaper advertisements glued on
and oversized text on patches appliquéd along the hem
reading "SUBSCRIBE FOR THE ECHO," a newspaper
from Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania.11 In 1910 a young
woman at a benefit fair at the Richmond County fair
grounds in Dongan Hills on Staten Island dressed "in a
frock made from 'the family newspaper of Staten
Island'" and walked around asking attendees to buy one.
According to the New York Sun, "a
man who spied his picture on the
newspaper dress approached her
and gently poking the half tone
cut that covered a section of her
side exclaimed, 'Why, that's me!' "12
Mrs. John F. Deegan, who attended
a fancy dress ball in 1927 wearing a
dress printed with pages of the
Pelham (NY) Sun distributed
"miniature copies of The Sun which
were prized as souvenirs and were
specially printed for the occasion."13
In 1902 another society editor,
Minnie Biglin of Wabaunsee
County, Kansas, had pages of the
Alta Vista Journal, her employer,
printed on muslin that she then
made into a dress to wear to a
costume ball hosted by the paper.
She attended the event with her
brother, Earl Biglin, who dressed as
a printer's devil, a term for a
printer's apprentice. Like Martha Lin Manly, Biglin won
a prize for her costume, which, along with a photograph
of the siblings, is now in the collection of the Kansas
State Historical Society.14
Though more modest than Manly's later flapperstyle dress, Biglin's long-sleeve dress with a sailor collar
also proclaims her modernity. Literally wearing their
work proclaimed their status as working women, and
donning garments with dates printed on them illustrated
their contemporary interests. Manly, a college-educated
woman who advocated for equal pay for women, even
placed the society page section heading with her name
daringly in the front center, just below the dropped
waist; the newspaper's mast head is more modestly
arranged across the top of the dress.15 That both women,
and others like them, chose to make their costumes of